The Internet of things (IoT) refers to the network of physical objects with Internet connectivity (connected devices), and the communication between them. These connected devices and systems collect and exchange data. The IoT has been defined as “the infrastructure of the information society”. The IoT extends Internet connectivity beyond traditional devices such as desktop and laptop computers and smart phones to a range of devices and everyday things that use embedded technology to communicate and interact with the external environment.
There are great challenges related to connecting such devices, as they will number in the billions, must be able to operate for long periods of time without physical connections to both the power grid and the Internet, and may monitor and control critical systems. In order to serve the greatest number of applications and provide the transformation of the modern world that result from connecting all manner of physical objects, the costs of these solutions, both the physical devices as well as the networks used for communicating with them must be exceedingly small.
Access to such devices is delivered via wireless communications technologies and as such is supported by radio frequency gateways or access points, which create the wireless Radio Access Network (RAN). Gateways provide the bidirectional wireless connectivity supporting the secure data transmission necessary to connect the IoT to the systems which ultimately extract and deliver valuable information. Historically, End-Devices have been responsible for negotiating associations with nearby gateways to support their communications; examples of this are the current WiFi and Cellular networks. This approach is not optimal for extremely low cost and battery powered devices. Modern centralized network architectures, sometimes called Software Defined Networks (SDNs) provide an approach to optimize the network to serve these constrained devices; the LoRaWAN Specification maintained by the LoRa Alliance network defines the architecture of one such system. In such an architecture, a single transmission for an End-Device may be received and processed by many gateways; these gateways pass all communications from the end-devices to a centralized control service which deduplicates and validates the message prior to forwarding it to the Application Provider. The centralized controller is thus able to optimize the end-device and network configurations while minimizing End-Device complexity, cost and power consumption. In addition, this system architecture facilitates very low cost (low-touch or zero touch) End-Device deployment and information delivery solutions. However, these benefits are eroded when many distinct networks (each independently controlled) are necessary to provide the communication service to the end-devices. Massive scale deployment of the IoT requires a pervasive RAN to provide the wireless connectivity to national or even global deployments of End-Devices. Consequences of a lack of cooperative RAN deployments include extra cost due to the duplication of physical infrastructure and significant performance degradation due to Physical and MAC layer interference. By taking all of the available RAN capacity and making it easy and financially beneficial to all parties to be shared, critical barriers to the rapid adoption and deployment of IoT solutions will be removed.
What is required is a system and method which enables and incentivizes an IoT network build out that is cooperative and equitable, secure, efficient, low-cost, low-power, fast, and can scale to connect billions of End-Devices.